Last Saturday I went for an ice cream at Xara. My companion had an appointment with Maria Kubanis who was preparing a theatrical performance, and I got the chance to pop up. So I phoned my maid of honor, Gogo, and asked her if she wanted us to go for an ice cream…she enthusiastically, replied yes and here we did.

I picked her up from Exarchia Square, we reached Patission Avenue and parked.

My anxiety was great. Why; Because I had not been to that place Hara for 25 years, since we were hopping in the nearby Abares with Michalis Panagiotakis and other boats and listening to “Stefana” by Makis. And then we couldn’t skip a middle-night ice cream. At Xara, I used to have Chicago ice cream or parfait ice cream. Super creamy parfait ice cream, no dried fruit pieces, but only with almonds!

We arrived, sat down, ordered. Creamy parfait ice cream both, because Gogo is not to experience. We waited for a while because it was full of people, but in the end the ice creams were served exactly as I remembered. A parfait hill crowned with whipped cream and a dose of chopped almonds. Plus a dose of sour cherry syrup for my maid of honor.

It wasn’t just the look like the thimble. It was the taste too! The exact same and unalterable taste, as if it had not been morning, afternoon, day, or night since we were glycemic after “make me a coffee and don’t put sugar”. I looked at Gogo, Gogo looked at me too, and if we weren’t kids big, close, very close to 50, we would have cried. But we are not children, we are creatures of a certain age, and we are enough to eat with pleasure our ice cream.

Then I took her back home and I went back home too. And along the way, I thought that some things in a city shouldn’t change. It is forbidden to change.

They must stay the same, give it a specific character and not make it an annex to globalization. What would Paris gain if Postmodern Bistro was made with foam and nitrogen without Coupole? What would Vienna get if Demel shut down and made Starbucks? How far would Zurich go if Kronenhalle were transformed into Burger King or at least Wendy’s? Nothing, absolutely nothing, to save, which we are used to saying.

I thought about all this and I also thought that up to 20 years ago I had read the first piece of “deconstruction” of the Greek cuisine. In “Athenorama” it was, signed by a chick at that time (and later highly publicized) colleague. He had then referred to Dourabeis’ shrimp soup. And give it ‘yes but but’ and get ‘outdated’ and supplement ‘it could get more advanced with a little of it and something of it’, I suppose. The well-known Greek tactic “in order to build a new one, I must absolutely destroy the old one”. Contribution as if to say and see where we have arrived.

Let’s explain: I’m not against the new. I love it as well as we loved all the deprived creatures when we graduated from elementary school in the 1970s. But this is the modern Greek mania to destroy every tradition in the name of modernity. “How else would it sell modernity?” You ask me, and you’re right.

My response; There is no need to refill either Hara’s ice cream or Dourabeis’ shrimp soup.

He can present his own proposal without cannibalism. And let’s coexist the old with the new in a relative harmony. But how to get to Oedipus country without the killings?